Losing My Voice to Find It

“This is the middle book of a trilogy, yet it has none of the typical middle book problems. Instead, I’m rating three stars for a reason I never would have expected: too much excellent character development in a blended genre context which results in the main character splitting into 3 distinct characters that isn’t part of the planned storyline and keeps jarring me out of the moment.”

When a reader names your book in her top 10 of 125 books that year, rereads it within a month, and still gives it three stars, you pay attention. When she explains that your protagonist feels like three different people wearing the same name, you know something went wrong. When she’s absolutely right, you have to face an uncomfortable truth.

Joanne Budzien’s 2,000-word review of Death or Glory documented something I didn’t realize happened. She watched my authorial voice emerge in real-time while I was still trying to write what I thought military fantasy should be. She caught me mid-transition, fighting myself on every page.

My debut novel The Widow’s Son told the story of Anne O’Sullivan, a widow searching for her supernatural son across a haunted American southwest filled with vampires, witches, zombies, and giant mechanical cavalry golems. I wrote what felt natural—character transformation, faith as organic part of personality rather than sermon, action serving story instead of overwhelming it.

The review from Ruined Chapel caught something about my instincts. The discussions about faith felt “like a natural part of the characters’ evolution” rather than preaching. Anne transformed from “merely a ‘confounded woman’ into a confident, capable, and relatable character.” The reviewer loved it.

I had literary instincts working in genre clothing. The foundation was there. I just didn’t know it yet.

Learning the “Right” Way

Then came Doomsday Recon, my first military fantasy. Forty percent longer than my debut (which was already a solid 400 pages). Already ambitious. Jason Anspach (credited as co-author), edited my sprawling draft to conform to genre norms. This wasn’t a bad thing—military science fiction and fantasy is what WarGate’s audience expects. 

But I internalized something dangerous. Military fantasy has rules. Character introspection slows pacing. Readers want action. Keep the philosophical stuff light. Show combat skills, tactical thinking, squad dynamics. That’s what the genre demands.

Not Jason’s fault. He was teaching me his craft. But it was the wrong mentorship for me, because I was learning to write what military fantasy “should” be instead of trusting what my voice naturally produced.

Doomsday Recon is a good book. Readers loved it. Some veterans have called it the most authentic military fiction they’ve ever read. But it moved me away from the character-focused approach that worked in The Widow’s Son.

The Awkward Middle Child

Book two of the trilogy, Death or Glory, I wrote entirely on my own. No heavy editing for genre conformity. Just me trying to honor what I’d learned while finding my own voice. I thought I was writing straight genre fiction.

My voice had other plans.

Joanne identified what she called “the three Bennetts problem.” My main character Sergeant Nephi Bennett split into what felt like three distinct people.

Sergeant Bennett: “really coming into his own while leading his squad. We see glimpses of the husband/consort who follows orders as his part of the team effort. 4 stars.”

Competent. Professional. Exactly what genre readers expect.

Ben-Ette: “experiences growing pains with his increasing powers and wrestles with what it means to be separate while still needing to belong to something larger. 4 stars.”

Genre conventions, handled well. Magic system, chosen one dynamics, the fantasy beats.

Nephi: “wrestles with identity, honor, and trade-offs for the greater good as a man on the path to being a philosopher-king… We’re just laughing and crying along with Bennett for the sheer tragedy when no good choices exist and yet making no choice is probably the worst option.”

Five stars.

She compared these sections favorably to Doctor Zhivago. “This is the novel that Doctor Zhivago wanted to be. Doctor Zhivago ended up with some dry lectures to tell instead of show. Death or Glory shows the painful conversations between folks who are having an emotional human-to-human moment.”

Here’s what killed me—she was right. The literary sections were so much stronger that they made the genre-conforming parts feel flat by comparison. I was code-switching unconsciously. Whenever the story hit genuine moral weight, my literary instincts hijacked the narrative. Then I’d snap back to “writing military fantasy properly” for tactical sequences and action beats.

Joanne saw it clearly. “I personally would have preferred most character development for Bennett be the literary character with little/no personality development in the military and fantasy genres. All the other characters develop as coherent characters across the genres through the action and reflecting on the action. Only Bennett is this tripartite entity.”

Everyone else in the book worked. Just my protagonist splitting into three people. The main character. The one readers spend the most time with.

That guy.

She wanted more of my actual voice and less of the genre conformity I kept forcing onto the page.

When I Couldn’t Hide

The hardest scenes in Death or Glory involved sexual torture and its aftermath. A character named First to Dance gets captured and is brutalized for days—all to break the protagonist, Bennett. He watches, helpless, as they systematically destroy someone he cares about, and himself in the process. Then comes the long recovery—the psychological damage that doesn’t heal when the physical wounds do.

Because rape isn’t a plot point.

I couldn’t use genre conventions to soften these scenes. Military fantasy has ways to handle battlefield trauma—usually by moving past it quickly, showing resilience, getting the character back in action.

But this wouldn’t cooperate. The story demanded I sit with the horror and the aftermath. Looking away wasn’t an option.

Joanne felt it. “Williamson gives us the feelings without almost no details of the bodies involved. It’s all emotion and very, very effective.”

And: “This is the reality of acquiring a disability that won’t get better and life is forever changed, even though ‘you look fine!’”

Those scenes worked. Five-star material according to her review. Because I stopped trying to write proper military fantasy and just wrote what the moment required.

I wasn’t conscious of the pattern at the time. I just knew certain scenes needed something different. Something more honest. But I couldn’t sustain it across the whole book because I kept returning to what I thought I was supposed to write. The moment the pressure eased, I’d slip back into genre mode.

The result? A book that felt like three different novels going through the same timeline, with the literary voice so strong it made everything else feel like performance.

Starting in the Abyss

Chapter One of Born in Battle opens with Bennett contemplating suicide.

That’s not a military fantasy beat. That’s not genre. That’s just truth. The book required it from page one and only got darker from there. No gradual descent, no building up to difficult content. We start in the abyss.

What changed? The story was so uncompromising that genre expectations became irrelevant. I couldn’t dress this up as fun military adventure. Bennett’s psychological state, the accumulated trauma, the moral weight of impossible choices—all of it demanded I write from my actual voice or fail completely.

No more code-switching between “this is the military section” and “this is the literary section.” Just one voice, one approach. Here’s a man broken by what he’s witnessed and done, and we’re sitting with that darkness for the entire book. Nearly 600 pages of it. It’s not grimdark and it’s not nihilism. It’s the brutal reality of war. 

Joanne ranked Born in Battle as top five books she’s ever read in her life. Not just that year. Ever. She noted it “flows seamlessly” from Death or Glory because the awkward voice transitions disappeared. Just consistent, unflinching honesty from beginning to end.

I’d stopped fighting myself. The literary voice wasn’t interrupting the genre fiction—it was the genre fiction. I just needed a story that demanded it from the start so I’d quit trying to write what I thought readers wanted.

Burning Over a Quarter Million Words

After Born in Battle, I revisited the first book of my Dark Dominion sequence, Immortal, a novel I’d already written, rewritten, and discarded three times. Over a quarter of million words burned because they weren’t working.

On the fourth page-one rewrite I finally got it right.

The story centers on Sarai, a former elite operative who was sexually assaulted by the god-emperor she served. She bears his child—a biological impossibility that challenges the empire’s theological foundations. Complete amnesia means she doesn’t remember who she was or what she’s capable of. PTSD from the assault creates barriers to intimacy and trust.

Drafts one through three looked like this: trying to write military science fiction. Strong female protagonist with cool psychic powers in space battles. Political intrigue. Action sequences. Plot-driven-genre beats.

But Sarai wouldn’t cooperate. Her trauma, the assault, the impossible pregnancy, the psychological torture she endures, the maternal desperation that she experiences—none of it fit comfortably in military SF conventions. Those conventions exist partly to make unbearable things bearable. They provide distance, structure, familiar patterns.

The third complete rewrite actually wasn’t bad. Publishable even. WarGate Book’s Editor-in-Chief, David Gatewood, said it was good, but he added, “It could be better.” It needed to be character-driven. It needed the voice I’d honed in Born in Battle.

Sarai’s story demanded intimacy with suffering.

After finishing Born in Battle, I returned to Immortal for the fourth attempt. This time I asked a different question. Not “how do I make this work as military science fiction?” but “what is Sarai’s story and how does she want me to tell it?”

I stopped trying to write military fantasy and just told Sarai’s story as truthfully as I possibly could.

Draft four worked. The duology—Immortal and Godsbane—flowed faster than anything I’d written before because I just followed Sarai’s journey instead of trying to force her into genre shapes that didn’t fit. Those books are some of my most honest writing to date. (They also were wrong for WarGate Book’s audience, and I’m currently looking for a new publisher for them.)

Looking back, I can trace the arc.

The Widow’s Son had natural literary instincts in genre clothing. I wrote what felt right.

Doomsday Recon taught me genre conventions.

Death or Glory put me at war with myself on every page as literary voice emerged unconsciously while I tried to write “proper” military fantasy.

Born in Battle ended the fight. The story demanded truth from page one, and I had an editor who believed in me and that my literary voice could reach a genre audience. (It did, and the response was an enthusiastic 4.8-star average across hundreds of reviews.)

Immortal Draft 4 applied the lesson consciously. I abandoned genre expectations completely. 

Each book taught me something. But the lesson took five books to sink in—readers respond to authenticity, not genre performance. They can tell when you’re writing truthfully versus trying to deliver what you think they want.

My Brand: Literary Fiction in a Genre Trench Coat

“Literary fiction in a genre trench coat” is a term Joanne coined in her review of Born in Battle. It’s not an excuse or apology. It’s a positioning statement. I write genre fiction—space opera, military fantasy, weird westerns. But I write it with literary sensibilities. Complex moral questions without easy answers. Characters sitting with consequences. Real psychological weight. The 3 AM darkness where you question everything.

For Doors to the Stars, which releases in February 2026, I brought this approach to YA. Dark space opera for teenage readers. Not sanitized—calibrated. Writing truthfully about moral complexity while respecting where younger readers are developmentally. They can handle difficult questions and genuine stakes. They just need characters making choices they can understand emotionally, consequences that feel real without being gratuitous, and hope that acknowledges darkness without naive optimism.

My current project, The Stygian Blades, might be the most ambitious application of this approach yet. Epic fantasy centered on Kit Tarlton, a teenage actress fleeing murder charges after stabbing a nobleman’s son who tried to assault her. She accidentally steals treasonous correspondence and gets recruited by a mercenary company of social outcasts—sex workers, drunken mages, foreign spies, practitioners of illegal magic. Together they must decode conspiracy while navigating a world that’s already decided they’re disposable.

This story couldn’t exist without the voice I fought so hard to find. The genre expectations for epic fantasy would want me to sanitize these characters. Make the sex workers tragic victims waiting for rescue. Make the mercenaries lovable rogues rather than professional killers who’ve committed atrocities for pay. Turn the political conspiracy into a clear battle between good and evil rather than a choice between different flavors of imperial violence. Make Kit’s assault a backstory beat that motivates her but doesn’t actually affect how she moves through the world. Doesn’t make her sit with herself and the consequences of her actions in the dark and torture herself with what ifs.

Kit wondered how the Caravan of Mirth and Marvels was getting on. Mostly she tried not to think about it. She’d fled, leaving them with the mess she’d made. Depending on Lord Umberlow’s whim they could face anything from a stern rebuke to imprisonment or… Martyrs’ forbid, torture. Even the noose wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities. She didn’t feel a damned thing for swiving poxy Richard Percy’s stones with a carving knife, but the idea of Aunt Meg rotting in the gaol or hanging from a tree made her ill and sleepless.

She should’ve just let the inbred whoreson fuck her. It would’ve been over quickly enough and then everything would be fine. The troupe would’ve moved on and the absolute worst that might’ve happened was her squeezing out a wailing, sour-faced Percy in nine moons.

Because genre norms and sanitization aren’t what Kit’s story requires at all. I tried that. Got to 80K words and burned them with fire. Started over.

Her self-defense is both justified and punishable—the text never questions whether she was right to fight back, only whether she’ll survive the consequences. The sex workers have legitimate disagreements about whether opposing the conspiracy serves their interests. Some want to fight. Others just want to survive in a system that’s already destroyed them. The Stygian Blades reminisce about switching sides mid-battle because the other army offered better pay. Queen Elspeth, whose assassination they’re trying to prevent, rules an empire casually engaged in genocidal colonial violence.

These are the kinds of moral complications that genre conventions exist partly to smooth over. Make the heroes more heroic. Make their cause more just. Make survival less about compromise and more about virtue. But smoothing those complications would betray what makes these characters worth writing about. They’re people navigating impossible systems with the tools available to them, which sometimes means violence, deception, and alliances with other people society has marginalized.

The literary voice I developed through Born in Battle and Immortal lets me sit with those contradictions without resolving them. I can write Kit’s desperate theatrical speech rallying the company to fight—pure melodrama that works precisely because it offers narrative agency against impossible odds—while also showing that her family are secretly loyal to the conspirators and she might be choosing pragmatism over principle. I can write the found family warmth of the Stygian Blades while acknowledging they’re mercenaries who’ve sold violence for profit across colonial wars.

It’s not grimdark. It’s not nihilism. It’s just life. And life can be ugly. It can also be beautiful. Contrast is everything. 

The theatrical dialogue, the acrostic puzzles and lurid broadsides, Sebastian’s bawdy drunken facility with verse—these aren’t flourishes for their own sake. They’re the armor that lets me honestly critique sexual exploitation and violence, religious persecution, colonial gaze and oppression, Orientalism, and political assassination without sensationalizing or reducing any of it or the characters to tired—or worse, harmful—stereotypes. It’s literary satire that trusts the reader instead of pausing for periodic anachronistic 21st century moralizing lectures. 

But it’s not homework either. It’s literary fiction in genre trappings because those elements allow me to explore the important issues without pretentiousness or the discomfort a contemporary narrative would. Science fiction and fantasy are among our best tools for exploring difficult themes precisely because of their indirection. The magic and blasters aren’t evasion—they’re the distance that lets us stare directly at what we might otherwise refuse to see. The genre trappings create just enough separation to make honesty bearable.

The Stygian Blades is what happens when you take the lesson of Death or Glory seriously from page one. Write what the story requires, not what the genre expects. These characters deserve complexity. Their circumstances deserve honesty. The world they navigate—simultaneously gorgeous and brutal, shot through with imperial violence and genuine friendship—deserves prose that can hold both beauty and horror without flinching from either.

The lesson from Death or Glory and Born in Battle? Your readers are smarter than you think. They feel the seams when you’re performing genre expectations. They respond to truth even when it’s uncomfortable.

Especially when it’s uncomfortable.

Full Circle

Joanne gave Death or Glory three stars despite loving it because she felt every seam where I was fighting myself. The book was good enough to reread in a month, good enough for her top 10 that year, but the inconsistency frustrated her. She wanted more of the literary voice and less of the genre conformity.

She gave Born in Battle top-five-ever status because there were no seams. Just consistent honesty.

The paradox? I had to learn genre conventions to know which ones to break. The learning wasn’t wasted time—I needed those tools. But I also needed to understand that genre conventions serve the story, not the other way around. When conventions help, use them. When they get in the way, break them.

And, frankly, I learned I’m not a genre author. I’m not a strictly literary author either. I’m something in-between. And that’s okay.

So I’m owning it. Making it my brand.

To writers struggling with similar tensions—your voice might not fit neatly into genre boxes. That’s not failure. But you might need to learn the boxes first to understand why they don’t work for you and what you need instead.

Sometimes finding your voice means recognizing you had it all along. You lost it trying to be what you thought you should be. Then you fought your way back to writing truthfully.

And sometimes a reader documents that fight so precisely that you can use her review to understand your own journey better than you understood it while living through it.

Thanks, Joanne. You saw it before I did.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​